It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights. It’s time to meet the 55 members of Uefa’s inaugural Nations League as streamed into four coefficient-based subsets.
Yes, it’s finally here. European football’s latest format kicked into gear this week, with World Cup semi-finalists England facing also-rans Spain on Saturday in what is an unusually tasty-looking first post-tournament fixture.
Nobody knows how this is going to feel just yet. The good news is, there will be ceremony, music and a sense of ersatz pomp. There is even an official Uefa Nations League anthem which will be played before every game and is intended to “capture the feeling of a really important competition”. The anthem has a title that really conveys this sense of sporting grandeur. It is called The Uefa Nations League Anthem.
It’s pretty good too, with an impassioned choral refrain that makes it sound like a mash-up between an advert for razor blades and the incidental music from a horror film scene where a demonic child stabs a priest with a garden rake. My favourite bit comes right at the end where the choir sings “the Nation’s LeeeAGUE”, then cuts to silence. Eventually I realised this is because it sounds like the final note of the title credits to Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge. And yes I can confirm The Uefa Nations League Anthem is significantly improved by shouting “Ah-ha” at the end.
The new format makes plenty of sense, a way of bundling together the rag-bag of friendlies that traditionally fill international breaks. The final stages will add a note of gerrymandered tension to the otherwise football-free summer of 2019. Best of all, it shunts England straight back into a proper game against high-class opponents, the kind of opponents that, for all the panting hysteria, they struggled against at the World Cup.
For all the credit stored up, there is a degree of pressure here in going again so soon. Or if not pressure, then a chance to look again, to find the reality behind the excitements of the summer. You remember it, don’t you? That period not so long ago when the sun baked the earth, when beer fell from the sky like warm rain and when everyone lost themselves in football, sang the old songs and pretended the world wasn’t falling to bits by staggering down Maidstone high street dressed only in Y-fronts and a waistcoat, pausing occasionally to attach a series of laughing-crying emojis to a meme of Hitler in his bunker worrying about Kieran Trippier’s dead-ball delivery.
England were inspiring and likable in Russia, a team that for once seemed more than the sum of their parts. But time has passed. Things have settled. It is probably a good moment to ask the questions: was that just a beautifully self-contained moment? Is it sustainable? More to the point, are they actually any good?
This week Jordan Henderson said he’d made a point of watching the Croatia defeat again in full over the summer. He said it had been hard, a painful experience. He’s right too. You don’t need to have played in it. I also watched that game back. Faced with a slightly better team, England had two shots on target in 120 minutes. From 15 minutes in they were always chasing, unable to respond as central midfield was wrested away. No shame in that, of course. Luka Modric was irresistible in Russia, spreading his personal voodoo across central midfields from Kazan to Moscow. But it was part of a pattern. England played seven games at the World Cup, lost three, won three and drew one. The games they lost were against first-rate international teams. The teams they beat were ranked 13th, 24th and 69th in the world.
None of this is criticism, just a statement of some facts. This was a supremely well-managed England team, with an awareness of their own weaknesses and a commitment to finessing their limited strengths. England went five hours without scoring from open play, the best part of which was that this was, in effect, part of the gameplan. All the best teams, and certainly the best England teams, tend to win like this, as Southgate’s metrics had already told him.
And yet it is hard to avoid the feeling a semi-final was also a kind of chimera, a case of wringing the absolute most out of your resources, but not evidence of a wider good health. There is something alarmingly thin about the current injury-depleted squad. An odd fact: had Southgate lost Kyle Walker too this would have been the first post-World Cup or post-Euro selection in England’s 68-year tournament history that doesn’t have a single player in the ranks who has started regularly in a league title-winning team.
England have four goalkeepers, three strikers and one authentic central midfielder, because basically that’s what there is. The players Southgate has picked appeared in a combined 58% of possible Premier League games this season. Phil Foden, who may or may not be exactly what they need, has played eight minutes. Even the sight of Gareth himself over the summer, out there on his touchline looking pained and decent, like the ghost of an American civil war hero, was a little illusory and nostalgic, a show of kinder, softer forces at work.
The challenge now is to sustain that level, to improve a team still essentially fighting against their own environment; and who will need above all a little patience after the gorgeous escapism of the summer.
• This article was amended to take account of the fact that Kyle Walker was a regular starter in Manchester City’s title-winning team.
